


Kill Switch

by confiscatedretina



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-12 21:23:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4495230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/confiscatedretina/pseuds/confiscatedretina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can't even remember a time when it bothered you, being a pawn in someone's game.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kill Switch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [drikstreedur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/drikstreedur/gifts).



> Happy Ancestral Anthology, drikstreedur! I perhaps took your prompt a bit too literally in parts, but I hope you'll enjoy this nonetheless. :)

It starts with a giggle, a faint raspy sound that is almost alien in the wet engine block. In the back of your mind, nearly smothered by the growing cacophony that is the imminently deceased of an entire species, you can just hear a voice laughing, shrill and screaming: your voice. After sweeps beyond count trapped in this block you're going to die. 

You can't fucking wait.

The euphoric anticipation is overwhelming. You haven't felt anything, not pain nor grief, not even simple insanity, for what feels like an eternity. Lock a troll into a power system with no need for repair and he eventually ceases to be anything more than a battery. The neglectful cruelty of it all used to piss you off, but even anger is worn to smooth nothingness with the flow of enough time. Assuming that is the case, anyway. It's not impossible you've only been here a few nights. You doubt that, but it's not like there's any way to tell time in an empty room that never changes.

In your head the voices are growing louder. Your giggling has evolved into a throaty chuckle just loud enough to be heard over dripping water and a star ship's constant thrum. It hurts but only because you haven't felt this part of your body in so long. You were inured to pain long ago. When something is so constant, a part of your every breath, the body eventually becomes immune.

Having gone so long without any stimulus whatsoever, you get caught up in the unfamiliar sound of your own voice. At one point the sound becomes a gurgling whimper and you think you might be crying. If the engine block wasn't completely soundproof, you're sure someone would have come in to see what was wrong with the ship's power supply when that gagging whimper transitioned into a hysterical scream.

What the fuck is taking so long?! The death of an entire species is putting pressure on your pan. It feels like your cranial dome is cracking from the inside out. Part of you is thrilled by the novelty of this new sensation. The rest is sick of waiting and you thrash in your biowires to burn off some of this excess energy, blood dribbling into the antiseptic solution at your feet.

Something fleshy inside tears with your heaving laughter. You spasm and cough and wheeze past it. The internal tear mends sometime after you've begun to forget the taste of fresh blood in your mouth. 

At last a deep rumble of sound builds in the center of your universe and a wave of young voices screams through your head. You scream with them, laughing, until your vocal chords rip. The tsunami of noise shreds through trollkind, a crest of coughing wails in your head coming ever closer. The ship hums around you, red and blue light pulsing through the biowires at steadily increasing speed. You feel a deep nausea as psionic energy is siphoned out of you in a massive pull. The ship tears through space so suddenly and fast even you can feel it. The singularity of dead silence looms in your mind as you approach a shrieking event horizon.

Please, please....!

Red and blue cycle so fast in front of you that the colors blur into a painful brightness. You howl, still euphoric, as a neutron dense burst of sound crushes your body. Blood arcs from your eyes, your nose, and the volume of it pouring out your mouth silences your manic laughter at last.

Silence. Total. Complete.

Are you dead?

The Handmaid twitches her chin, the barest affirmation. Grinning, you fall out of your body and land in the calf-deep water at her feet.

With a blink of her luminous eyes she lifts your spirit into the air, dragging you along like puff plant seeds in a breeze. Upside down you look at your body, hale and young save for the blood dripping out of every orifice and the horns so long they are lost in the biotech tangle above. A giddy, happy hum bubbles out of you and the Handmaid snorts disapproval as the two of you pass through the engine block door.

A blue blooded officer lies slumped in the corridor, her ghost looking down at the body with disapproval. You are pulled past a dozen similar scenes through hallways and rooms you have never seen. If you could remember how to do it, you'd wave at the spirits passing by. You settle for snickering and humming gleefully instead. They shrink away from the Handmaid and stare at you with suspicious curiosity or outright surprise. One bronze blood mumbles to his yellow blood companion something about the dissidents being right; you refuse to contemplate what that means.

It seems to take forever to get where you're going but you don't begrudge the delay. After sweeps only a tyrian blood could measure with nothing, this glut of motion and people and color is thrilling. Alas, the delight you've built up bleeds away when the Handmaid stops in an empty corridor.

She's lying on the floor, a mass of tangled black hair dotted with trinkets more costly than your entire life covering a face you never wanted to see again. Horns only rivaled by your own bob in time with sobs that convulse through her body. Her Imperious Condescension, pinnacle and empress of all trollkind, is sprawled gracelessly, crying like a wriggler. Her anguished face reflects off a pool of fuchsia tears that's as thick as blood. You watch her bauble-encrusted hands dig so viciously into her scalp that they rip loose bloodied strands of hair.

"Ffff...fhuh...." your throat spasms while you try to form words for the first time in multiples of your natural lifespan. "Fhuckkkk you."

The Condesce gasps, jerking toward you only to look right through. Her bloodshot eyes fix, pupils contracting in total hate, and she screams.

"You BEACH!"

Claws scythe past you and shriek through metal where the Handmaid was standing. The Demoness of Death now stands behind your oldest enemy, her face expressionless.

"Not yet," she says in an unfamiliar accent.

A thousand emotions and memories boil inside as you watch The Condesce lunge and snarl for The Handmaid, tears streaking down her cheeks. You used to hate her as deeply as it was possible and in every way. She'd come into your block to tell you the fates of your dear friends, the status of this rebellion or that which was being crushed under her heel, and sometimes just to talk about nothing because she knew the very sight of her made your blood curdle. You'd scream and thrash, try to bite her and spit bile at her face. After a point, all you wanted was for her to leave you alone, not realizing the utter hell you were wishing upon yourself until the night she left your cold block for the last time, locking the door behind her.

After that you had more time than anyone should to think. You burned through your grief and your anger until all that was left was cold logic. Even that ebbed away and you were reduced to counting as high as you could to the beat of electrical pulses traveling the wire encrusted walls. The day you realized she was doing what she thought best for her species while she played the longest game of all was the last time you had any coherent thought or awareness. You felt a pang of pitying empathy for the woman who had destroyed everything that meant anything to you. That was the instant you tipped into true insanity. When you came out of that screaming void, there was nothing left of the troll you had been. You were a battery, nothing more, and that was for the best.

Until tonight.

She didn't even acknowledge your existence. You are to her as you've become to yourself: nothing.

You are shaking with emotion and thought you've long since lost the ability to manage. Your mouth is working, trying to conjure more syllables, when The Handmaid's claws come to rest on your ephemeral shoulders. She turns you to face The Condesce, who is panting for breath and still sobbing, kneeling before you.

A bit of cold calculus comes to you and everything snaps into focus, startling a pleased chirp from your throat. The Handmaid is playing her own game and you're the first piece she's going o move. It's going to take a very long time for the ship to make it back to Alternia and there's nobody left to Her Imperious Condescension but the ghosts she holds to her with a rustblood's powers. One by one, The Handmaid will set them free until not even the memory of trollkind is left. 

Claws squeeze your shoulders and you lift your chin, baring your throat to Death herself while locking eyes with your old enemy.

"Don't do this," the Condesce pleads.

Fresh tears spill down her face as red-painted talons graze your neck. One fuchsia drop hangs on her chin as she opens her mouth to scream. It shivers on the edge of her skin and you smile. The Handmaid cuts you free the same instant that tear breaks away into humid air. A wrenching wail of utmost grief escorts you into freedom.

**Author's Note:**

> If the image doesn't appear, please let me know!
> 
> Image description:
> 
> The Helmsman, tangled in fuchsia and blue biowires, laughs as yellow blood pours out of his nose, eyes, and mouth. Red-painted claws gently grasp his shoulders, silhouetted in glowing red that flows up a pair of arms and curling horns: the Handmaid. At the top of the image, the Condesce's lower face is grimacing with grief, bright fuchsia tears spilling down her cheeks and past her gold jewelry.


End file.
